“There is no failure except in no longer trying.” ~ Elbert Hubbard

Note: I wrote this entry a few months ago and abandoned it, but did not delete it. Sometimes, despite recognizing the need for critical evaluation, it’s exhausting feeling trapped in a cycle of negative feedback. However, I remain firm in my belief that in order to support a person, product, platform, or service you have to hold it to the highest possible standard. In this, Second Life and Linden Lab continue to fail in critical ways that harpoon their potential longevity. I want Second Life to evolve and endure, but I don’t see that happening with the sycophantic and sentimental input that seems to predominate the other voices that often speak about it. The tightrope is taut between the walk from objective critic and caustic loon. That is why I always try to take some time before posting something of this nature. I did it with fashion posts — I do it with every post. This post was kept as a draft and unintentionally published the last time I came back to reconsider it. Rather than remove it and the comments, I will leave it as-is and add my thoughts on four and five as time allows. Generally I only like to make minor grammar revisions once a post is live, but as this one was published while incomplete, I’m making an exception.

1. Search
It is nearly impossible to find anything in SL if you don’t know exactly where it is to begin with. Why we have a search field at all is bewildering. You might as well just have a rollover that says “use Google to try and find a blog that wrote about what you’re looking for and good luck to you.”

Search is the one thing on this list that has actually gotten worse since I joined SL and that’s why I’m placing it above Communication. Let’s put aside the fact that the search mechanics are antiquated enough to make you miss Asking Jeeves. On top of poor search-ability that doesn’t seem to have any effectiveness with partial words or common misspellings (or capitalization or punctuation…), SL search results are easily gamed, poorly sorted and offer no value. This state of affairs is frustrating for users, but it’s devastating for mid-level storefront shops that don’t have the time to flog all day and spam all night (or the money to outbid the stores who produce poor quality crap, but know if they pay enough to get their stuff at the top they’ll be able to perpetuate their mediocrity). This is discouraging to new businesses who have few means of getting their products noticed or even shuffled fairly into the mix, and it’s crippling to event hosts and planners who have to spend insane amounts of time, effort and lindens in the hope that their event will generate enough word of mouth to make a dent in the noise.

What is most dismaying is that there’s really no motivation for Linden Lab to fix search as its constant failure assures them that more and more consumers will lean on the Marketplace to find things, which, of course, generates more income for Linden Lab. Unlike many others, I don’t think this situation was arrived at intentionally via conspiracy (when you have incompetence and indifference firmly in place, conspiracy is unnecessary), but it does seem like search is doomed to be kept low on the priority list totem pole.

2. Communication
So you want to develop a social platform? Excellent. Step one, make sure there is no easy way for people to communicate with one another.

Oh? Is that wrong?

YES! Yes, it’s wrong. Dear code monkeys: group chat has been broken for years now with constant lagging chats, failure to connect errors and other oh-so-fun hijinks.

For years. We could have connected every SL user to one another via tin can telegraph by now.

On the communication front, we have open chat that is limited to ranges land owners have no control over, voice chat that only works for Linux users if you offer up your first born to the dark side, (where we can disguise our voices — thanks for making that a priority), instant messaging that doesn’t allow for off-grid communications in any meaningful way, and the previously mentioned group chat that barely works for anyone. As for conference calls, I haven’t been able to make one of those work in voice or text since Halloween two years ago.

And then we have the clusterfuck that happens if you put too many avatars in one area together so they can communicate in the same place at the same time.

It is inexcusable that entertainment venues have to set up obnoxious relay chat devices with public channel listening scripts so that their guests on one side of the room can chat with people on the other side of the room. As a parcel or SIM owner, we should be able to set the range of our communications based on the purpose of our build. It’s shameful that our only means of cross-sim communication (group chat) fails a majority of the time and lags the rest of the time. Most of all, there is the format-sinking fact that nearly all communication seems doomed to being limited to SL-only. By now, there should be some way to incorporate tweets, facebook, skype and/or gchat to or from the grid as a matter of course. How can you have a metaverse hub that doesn’t communicate with the rest of the verse?

If we were just starting out and it was 2003/2004 and social networking was still making the rounds okay, but it’s 2011 and this isn’t working. For anyone.

Finally, as communication goes, we have the uberfail of ways to get messages/notifications when we’re offline. Those of us who are members of any active groups either have to turn them all off when we log or awake to a mailbox full of spam that caps our offline message limits. If you’re a marketplace seller, there is no way to turn on/off sale notifications per item which means that freebie you put up to be a nice person has become it’s own personal spam gift from the interwebs. Why can’t I opt to get only personal IMs when I’m offline?

And why in 2.0 can we not turn off group chat?

3. Privacy

I’m trying to think of a social networking tool on the internet that doesn’t allow you to go invisible, and I’m coming up with nothing. Oh wait, there’s this one, it’s called Second Life. In Second Life, despite eight years of users requesting and requesting and requesting the ability to work or play without being stalked or harassed by others, there is nothing.

If you intend to have any time to yourself in Second Life, you must start your store or blog or whatever under an alt. And once your alt puts something out on the grid with its name on it, you will then need to start another alt. Because there is a segment of the human population that will suck the light from a firefly if they think they can make themselves shiny and they don’t care what it says in your profile or how much you beg them to let you get back to them tomorrow. They spent thirty-two cents on your sofa, damn it, and they messed up the texture when they tried to edit it themselves without taking a copy first and IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO HELP RIGHT NOW!!!!! And because these types of people have spent what I can only imagine are entire lifetimes being avoided, they have figured out all the tricks to make sure they won’t be ignored short of boiling your bunny rabbit (and that’s only because they can’t mod-boil a no-transfer bunny). They know how to find your UUID. They have those attachments that show when someone’s online, even if their preferences try to block visibility. And they take great pleasuring in telling you that you can’t hide from them. And all of these people use the browsers that have these features built into the UI because “if everyone else is going to have it, I should, too.”

Then we have the merchants who collect your UUID from their vendors and add you to their non-group spam list which you cannot unsubscribe from. You get lovely little message all the time telling you that their newest piece of retextured junk is now ON SALE!!!! and when you IM them asking to be removed, you get dead silence. For some reason muting these people, their items, their dog and their grandmother doesn’t seem to help. Ways to combat this in SL? Zero.

I know that these are all communication issues, but privacy is a communication issue on many levels, so let’s just let them be different, mmmkay?.

4. Interface

I have tried for over a year to force myself to get used to the v2 interface. I have moved to exclusively using Firestorm when I log in these days, unless the repeated crashing makes it impossible and then I revert to Imprudence. The fact remains that despite the supposed performance improvements (which cannot be proved by me or most people I know) the SL v2 viewer interface is a clunker. Certainly part of this must be considered personal opinion, but there are also simple objective factors. On average I find that things which used to take me one or two clicks now involve more interaction. Dropping an item on a friend is frustrating. Organizing multiple IMs and dealing with group notices is a menace. Building is just a hassle.

I am the first to admit that my methods of using my camera controls is short bus, so I don’t include that or similar issues which I know are based on my lack of affection for hotkeys.

Although there is good reason to improve interfaces, they should be improvements to the existing structure, not change for change’s sake. The focus of changes should be ease of use and customer immersion, not sleek design over form and function. Most good interface architects know that you also make allowances for previous customers and existing users by providing revert mechanics to allow people to adapt over time.

I applaud the new features Linden Lab has been trying to provide. New LSL functions like TextBox are great. Being able to attach multiple objects on one slot is a great boon.

But the interface remains a clumsy fail, and Linden Lab seems content to allow TPVs to fix those problems rather than hammer out what their customer base really needs to be friendly with the main viewer.

5. Pricing

“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.” ~ Ray Bradbury

I resent that there are people making filk I like. I feel dirty.

…in the bad way.

“The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good – in spite of all the people who say he is very good.” ~ Robert Graves

I wrote this a long time ago, or at least the start of it. My initial thought was to crawl inside the concept of an ancient theater that would mourn the actors who played upon its stage, but the more I toyed with it and wrestled with it, the more I considered the concept of not the stage, but the language of the play itself as a living thing. Peeling away the setting left me with the bare meat of communication. There have been a handful of people through time who have woven their presence into the fold of a certain tongue — that transcended the very sounds and silences they employed to convey their cause.

Certainly, French would mourn Baudelaire.

As for English, well, the choice was embarrassingly obvious for me.

That said, I didn’t want to just take a handful of the most well known quotes and mash them about, or try and be clever with obscure references. Instead, I took my favorite passages and snippets and misplaced just enough pieces of the puzzle so that the original image could be remembered, while it tilted and slanted toward my purpose and then tucked that between the framework of my initial intent.

The things that come to us in dreams don’t always have to make sense. Sometimes they just want to be written.

Shakespeare’s Widow

Mezzanine dusted shadows
Lullaby her sweet insanity
Rhinestone rhymes of ancient times
Sphinx-laced riddles and vague profanities
Surviving through the Winters
And discontented vanities

She has not forgotten
No, she has never left
Say her passion’s misbegotten;
Say her alchemy is theft
But there are words that no one owns
Words immortal as the Spring
That is why no one can still her
That is why she sings:

“Come unto these yellow sands and then take hands.
Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered
The prince of darkness is a gentle man
And he hath robbed the rage of Caliban
There are daggers in his smiles
Things beyond all use and I do fear them
I defy the stars their havoc crying
But I am dying, Egypt, dying…”

They infect the spotlit stages
Foreign bodies lining walls
Her velvet sorrows pay their wages
They whore her for their curtain calls
She has suffered fools and sages
And outplayed them, one and all

She has not forgotten
No, she has never left
Say her passion’s misbegotten;
Say her alchemy is theft
But there are words that no one owns
Words immortal as the Spring
That is why no one can still her
That is why she sings:

“Come unto these yellow sands and then take hands.
Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered
The prince of darkness is a gentle man
And he hath robbed the rage of Caliban
There are daggers in his smiles
Things beyond all use and I do fear them
I defy the stars their havoc crying
But I am dying, Egypt, dying…”

She has magic no one owns
Immortal as the Spring
And even though time cannot still her
Sometimes, alone, she sings:

“I am patient as the tides
And I will never give up trying
But I have missed you all these long, long years,
And I am dying, Egypt, dying.
Oh, I am dying, Egypt, dying.”

“The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.” ~ Leonardo da Vinci

There are odd little paths we walk in virtuality.

When I joined SL, I had already been a writer for most of my life. When I was very little, I would cross out the parts of my storybooks I didn’t care for and rewrite them to my liking. As a tween I wrote terribly cheesy horror stories to try and shock the adults who endured listening to them (to their credit, they pretended to be disgusted enough to sate the miscreant in me). As a full-fledged teenager, I did that whole weeping heart in my poetry journal thing. In college I learned I was never going to become the reincarnation of Oscar Wilde; that took some time to heal. As a young adult I embraced the fact that while artful talent might take its sweet time to develop, I had an inherent skill that not everyone gets a chance to wield.

As an adult I have learned that a muse is a fickle whore of a creature and you take what you can grab from her when she deigns to show herself. Between visits you take turns hating her and pining for her and stitching together the remnants of your ego in cold sweat anticipation of her return.

My particular failing is a lack of brevity. If allowed the space, I will ruin my own writing with length. Even knowing this, I never considered myself a particularly good poet, nor did I ever consider that I’d have any gift for lyrics. It was only at the coaxing of musician friends in SL that I shared some scribblings. When I did, quite unexpectedly, a whole new world of collaboration and expression opened up for me.

I have been writing with Grace and Lyndon since 2007. January or February or June depending on how you want to start counting. I shared Lugo with Lyndon that January and wrote Fallen State of Grace for the girl in February. But it was late June when I sent Boxes to Lyndon and Last Chance to Grace and first heard them put their music styles to my words.

I don’t pretend to be able to express what it’s like to hear your poetry come out of someone else’s lips in a way you never imagined it yourself. I suppose, on an intellectual level, it’s a little like watching someone you love hold your child for the first time. There is a tender pride and a confusing loss that take place in tandem. You are parting with something that will never be wholly yours again, but in that giving there’s a sense of incredible connection.

Both of them have been performing collaborative songs for four years now. Four. Years. I consider myself to be at their mercy in many ways. Without me, both of them could go on to write and perform. Without them, this strange new way I’ve found to use my inner voice would be gone. I suppose I should be frightened by that, but I’ve never felt that way. I send them my scribblings and sometimes they like them enough to imbue their magic into my words. It’s a system that suits me. But I’m never quite able to get my head around hearing them play.

For a while now, Lyndon has taken to playing our songs at open mics around Seattle. And that’s where one of his musician friends heard him play our latest song, The Dangerous, and asked for a chart so he could work it up.

So today, I opened my mail and had a link to the above youtube video. It features a guy I’ve never met, never heard, never seen until today singing words I wrote. It’s one of the most strange, surreal three minutes and fifty one seconds I’ve ever experienced. Myriad flavors of emotion I haven’t begun to identify. (Although, I need to find out how to get in touch with him, if only to find out what the hell is going on with his lamp).

I get angry and frustrated with Linden Lab, Second Life, and humanity in general. I get exhausted by my disappointment at watching so much possibility squandered.

But some days I come face to face with the paths and possibilities that keep me on this particular road, and I remind myself that no one promised it would be paved in yellow bricks or lead to bejeweled cities. But the road does weave its way into places I could never otherwise explore or encounter, and I have to concede these small moments of awe.

People often ask one another why they stay in Second Life. I have several answers, but the one that I can’t get away from is that as a creative thinker and a tentative artist, there is nothing in virtuality that offers me the at-my-fingertips tools to unfurl the creative sinew more than SL. One day maybe open sims, etc will catch up. I embrace the possibilities of what is to come. But I’ve looked around at the newborns slouching toward Bethlehem and they don’t have the juice to fill my jelly jar yet. I’m beyond the whole novelty of the environment part. I’ve logged my time in someone else’s growing pains. If it’s not ready for prime time, call me later.

From now on, I’ll have a much simpler answer.

Why am I still here? That’s just the dangerous in me.

“He was no dragon. Fire cannot kill a dragon.” ~ Emilia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen (via Jane Espenson, David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and/or George R.R. Martin)

Daenerys Targaryen Tames the Drakyns

It all started innocently enough. Sax Shepherd Designs finally released their Animated Drakyn companions and I wanted to write a follow-up to my video blog preview. Lately due to fever, I’d been catching up on Game of Thrones. Yes, I know, Martin lacks a certain amount of creative talent and is devoid of any gift with prose… and he blatantly steals draws significant inspiration from every major fantasy series that came before his, but HBO and Jane Espenson pairing was enough to make me give it a go.

And of course, the moment I realized I had pet dragons to play with, I had to play dress up as Daenerys Targaryen.

Large Drakyn

I really didn’t think it would be so hard. And it started well. I took a trip to Truth and a purchased two “light blonde” packs — one that would suit the character and one that would allow for proper display of jewelry and upper body purchases. That took two minutes. Next, I remembered that my Shiny Things Boho Sandals are still awesome and up to par for even a Dothraki khaleesi. Next, for the trappings, I thought, no problem. In writing his novels, Martin leaned on existing fantasy tropes like a drunk on a sagging bar, and as we all know, John Norman’s Gorean environments thrive in Second Life. So I’ll just find some Tuchuk/She-Urt/Panther wrappings and be done.

Daenerys Targaryen Outfit

Three hours later, I finally had an outfit I felt comfortable with. Before I continue, it’s important to realize that I am both spoiled and picky. I don’t spend a lot of time in stores that fall below market standards these days, and a vast majority of creators for fantasy/costume wear of this sort are not up to the standard a fashion blogger would be accustomed to. Items do not come on multiple layers. Resizing scripts (if they exist) are badly scripted and not as customer-friendly as the more current offerings. Skirts in general are skirts only in the sense that they go around the hips and sort of dangle. The vast majority of “skirts” offered in the Gorean costume markets I visited were just badly textured scraps of flex prims. But that’s okay because most of the tops covered only a single breast if you were lucky. I get the impression the avatars that purchase these types of outfits aren’t wearing them for long or for the purpose of taming dragons.

The bulk of the outfit above comes from Torvis Gorean Weapons and Bina.

Let’s go over the Torvis stuffs first. The top was the main reason for the purchase, but the outfit seemed a background offering meant to be a bonus for the sale of the dagger included in the outfit (at least the dagger seemed to be the main focus of the advertising). The full skirt is actually better done than most, but it’s no-mod and the resizing scripts were obnoxious. Because of this, I couldn’t get the belt narrow enough for my hips without exposing my ass. So, I shopped and shopped and shopped until I found something else. Also, the top by itself exposed my left breast. Because it’s on the shirt layer (and only the shirt layer) it was a little frustrating to mix and match with.

Yes, I know. If I were using 2.0 it wouldn’t matter because I could have multiple things on the same layer. Imprudence isn’t offering that yet.

Daenerys Targaryen Support Outfits

On the left is the “Tende Slave Rags” outfit from Bina. Bina is one of the very few stores I visited that offered what I consider to be market-worthy products. Their prims were nicely done and nicely textured. There was some creativity in the pieces offered and most of them were on multiple layers. For medieval costuming, Bina and Vigo, were the best costumers I found (although nothing at Vigo struck me for this outfit – maybe a later entry). They’re not quite up to the quality of Evie’s Closet, but they’re close with lots of potential. The slave rags outfit has what may be the best all-prim waist sarong ever. It’s modify and copy (I re-tinted it in the previous photo) so the right textures could make it perfect for a swimsuit wrap for your beachy wear. Or, if you wanna play a little “You Tarzan, Me Jane” in the backyard, this outfit works for that, too.

On the right is the “Panther Scout” outfit from May Tolsen of May’s Soul. I wanted this for the leather straps that go around the top (they are a different layer from the shirt beneath) to hide the previously mentioned exposed breast. Unfortunately they only came on the shirt layer (suddenly, I’m shopping in SL 2007). I IMed May and she was an absolute sweetheart. She uploaded them for me on an undershit layer and then fought with me over trying to pay her for her time (I think she finally let me give her L$250 over the cost of the outfit, which is not NEARLY enough for a custom request, but some designers are just too kind for their own good).

And I was *so close* to being done.

Daenerys Targaryen Jewelry

Luckily I knew just where to go for jewelry. Previously, I had discovered TRIDENT while seeking dock supplies for the Freudian Slip. These “Lunnuitsa” bronze and ivory pieces are beyond perfect. I’ve always loved ivory, but it’s, of course, reprehensible to own any in reality. So being able to slip some on in the pixel is a nice treat. Plus, wearing bone helps keep the drakyns under thumb. If they get cheeky you can just tell them you’ll make a necklace out of them.

Where Does She Get Those Wonderful Toys?

Drakyn Animated Dragons – L$1475
Sax Shepherd Designs – Here Be Drakyns
Creator: Sax Shepherd
SLURL

SHAYNA PACK (Top & Big Skirt) – L$375
TORVIS GOREAN WEAPONS
Creator: Torvis Rainfall
SLURL

Panther Scout – L$250
May’s Soul
Creator: May Tolsen
SLURL

Lunnuitsa Necklace & Earrings – L$350 / L$250
TRIDENT
Creator: Rossana Llewellyn
SLURL

Tende Slave Rags – L$365
Bina
Creator: Cymoril Lightfoot
SLURL

Boho Sandals – L$250
Shiny Things
Creator: Fallingwater Cellardoor
SLURL